A bare suspended lightbulb illuminates four black & white Polaroid prints of images of (presumably) that same lightbulb, taped to a wall.

The reflection of a French mountain range in the roof of a car appears to sprout an actual rock formation.

Another car, in Stockholm, leaves a perfect silhouette of its profile in a dusting of snow on the pavement.

A crouching woman, mostly obscured by a little girl, makes a close-up portrait of the girl’s face with an amateur camera. Attached to a black & white print of that image with family album-style photo corners is a second print, presumably of the image made by the woman at that moment, showing the child apparently reaching for the woman’s camera.

A black & white Polaroid photograph of a naked woman’s pelvic area lies atop the dark dress of (presumably) that same woman, positioned in her pelvic area.

A hand holds a postcard image of the summer palace in Drottningholm, Sweden, taken in the warm weather, while the owner of hand and postcard confront the same vista in the winter.

Kenneth Josephson’s photographic works do not reduce well (or at all) to words. In that way, among others, they distinguish themselves from most conceptual photography and photo-based art, which often starts from an articulated or written premise and can equally often find satisfactory summation in words to which the images, uninteresting in and of themselves, serve as mere illustration or demonstration. Concept dictates percept.

Josephson’s work functions otherwise. His images fall somewhere between the visual puns of René Magritte and the elliptical, labyrinthine conundrums of Jorge Luis Borges. He shares with both a spare, stripped-down aesthetic, a fascination with layers and an inclination toward the recursive and self-reflexive. His pictures begin as optical experience, to which he then applies analytical consciousness. What his photography exemplifies one might define as visual thought, in which percept embodies concept.